Clay Owls- Two different Ways

Second grade students created clay owls after working on their Owl Close Up pictures in cray-pa.  Last year we made these from slabs of clay and this year was going to be the same...until my slab roller broke and I had only enough for 2 of my four classes.  I looked online and found another owl project made more like a pinch pot and decided to give it a try.  I found this great website that had pictures of the process.  If you ever teach a project about birds this site is amazing; http://redandthepeanut.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-to-make-ceramic-pottery-owl-out-of.html

Both types of owls came out great.  I think the slab owls are easier for the kids but I think most of them would have chosen the 3D one.  They both allowed for the kids to practice attaching clay with slip and score and were a great review of adding texture and a great follow up to our 2D owl project.

Here are a few of them:

Collage People

While looking around on Pinterest I came upon the artist MALIN KOORT.  We looked at her amazing paper illustrations.  Check her out here:  http://malinkoort.blogspot.se/.  The kids really enjoyed looking at her work and were very inspired.  We started out by making a paper person but soon the kids were into creating little environments for them.  It was very difficult to take pictures of them but here are a few views.  

Lego Minifigure Self Portraits

This project was a lot of fun.  Everyone loves lego minifigures.  I asked my fourth grade students to create a self-portrait minifigure style.  They had to include things that represent themselves into their picture. We used cardboard to create layers and give some dimension.  The relief made it easy to talk about foreground, middleground and background.  We also talked about value.  Students created value scales and then tried to color the foreground the darkest value, middleground a medium value and the background the lightest.